What we then do with it is another matter, of course. That’s when more traditional marketing skills come in, I suggest.

Taking the Blogmistress site as a case study, several hundred of you visit us every day now – which is wonderful (and thank you). But as the boss I then have to consider what we’re doing with and for you now that you’re here.

Of course much of what we aim to do is help you with your WordPress – one of the main reasons for creating the Blogmistress was to give me a great excuse to do just that – it’s what I like doing best – helping you to make sense of stuff that is within your grasp.

But then, with people to pay and hosting to maintain and pencil fetishes to be satisfied we also need to make better use of your attention from a business point of view. That’s the bit I’m rubbish at, that’s for certain (hence George on the team!).

Which brings me to you. What are you doing with the attention that you’ve worked hard to attract to your blog and website? Do you know just how much you’re getting and where it’s coming from?

What I’d love to do is listen to your advice and suggestions and then test at least some of them out, open R&D if you like – so we find out together what works, at least for us here, and what perhaps does not. So – get stuck in and share your nuggets of wisdom – as someone who has arrived here. And thank you.

or “why the Blogmistress does not apply every possible tag to blog posts”, or if I was to get all “awesome” I’d title this “The Skinny on WordPress Tags” perhaps – but I digress already.

After being gently admonished recently for not using tags prolifically for SEO purposes, I thought it time to outline just what to do with Tags.

It can be confusing to know just what to do with Tags in your WordPress blog posts. We have Categories so why do we need Tags?

And of course there are dozens of differing points of view on this – some “experts” insisting that tags are vital for SEO, and some, more sensibly (in my opinion), considering the wider strategy and user experience (which is what they are there for).

WordPress included the option of tagging your blog posts to offer another level of categorisation, sub-categories if you like, for your blog posts. Posts with similar tags can then be linked together, displayed together much in the same way as categories are, but more specific.

Before anything else, consider how using tags can be helpful for your visitors – never mind the search engines, focus on people. From their point of view Tags may be helpful in finding blog posts around a particular topic, within a Category. And of course by including that tag, it does offer a route that the search engines can follow in order to offer relevant results for their searchers.

Be careful not to overdo it. I suggest keeping tags to a minimum – too many and you not only dilute your blog post some, but you also add to the work your blog has to do to keep up with it all – and that can slow your website/blog down, something you do not want. Any SEO benefit could be wiped out by such, I suggest; it makes a difference.

So – make use of your Tags but keep them useful, focused and relevant.

Just looking at the snapshot of ours I can see a few that really are not going to be helpful for anyone, so will pop in and edit those. That can be a useful thing to do now and again, when you have a few dozen posts under your belt – take a look at your tag cloud and see if it is likely to help or hinder your visitors. I’ll be adding the tag cloud again when it is more relevant!

Thanks to Sarah‘s suggestion, I added the Tweet Old Posts plugin a while ago to cover a quiet time of heads down a-working followed by the team dropping like flies with flu and the like!

During that time, the work put into our older blog posts was double useful for us, sending out a tweet for the older posts, that people won’t yet have read or who might have forgotten about.

And the effect on the site visits has been significant, considering we’ve not been creating fresh daily posts, we are still getting a lot of new visitors, who are then reading further.

So – how to set it up yourself:

From your Dashboard, go to Plugins, Add New and search for Tweet Old Posts – install now and Activate

In your Dashboard’s sidebar, you can now see a section Tweet Old Post – it will be under the main sections, near the bottom.

There you want to set any pre-fix to the post title, the intervals, etc – work your way through those.

And you will want to authorise the plugin to use your Twitter account – that’s at the top of the settings page.

And away you go…

A couple of things to consider when doing the same for your WordPress blog:

don’t overdo it – I’ve reset the interval for tweeting old Blogmistress posts to just a couple of times a day now, at least until we tweet more generally (at present we’re only tweeting posts and that’s not my preferred way to use Twitter).

set up an extra category just for this purpose, so that you can be sure that only relevant old posts will be retweeted.

If you don’t want to be a-tweeting on Christmas Day, remember to de-activate for the duration (I think I got away with it but would have preferred not to have been business twittering on such a day).

Chatting with a designer colleague last week, he wanted to explore just how useful WordPress can be in bringing together the various aspects of social media these days. How can the power of WordPress be harnessed with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and goodness knows how much more?

Perhaps the most immediately obvious channel that WordPress can include is Twitter – not only by encouraging us to “tweet this” but also showing us a feed of tweets (hopefully relevant!), encouraging visitors to “follow me”, and more. And now with Facebook joining in, we can show that we “like” a blog post to all of our friends and connections – sharing our information with those that are happy keeping their social media within the one place.

And then there are our favourite online networks, forums and the link – YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, 4Networking, Ecademy – there are many to suit our myriad profiles.

The leap from LinkedIn to Facebook is not going to suit everyone, so by including both on your blog – using your blog as the central hub – you appeal to your wider audience. Give your readers what they want – some like Facebook, others like LinkedIn, some will only see your YouTube video if you include it elsewhere, and Twitter – which some of us love and others cannot see the point.

Use your WordPress blog as the hub and that way:

you can be sure of owning the content

bring together comments,

update each of the online platforms you use

benefit from the activity for your website (rather than someone else’s!)

The thing to do is indeed make use of the forums and platforms, but bring it “home” so that your blog and website gets the benefit too.

Having recently noticed someone selling their Internet marketing wares recently and including the fact that Google picks up their blog content within an hour as a selling point, I’d rather like to point out that this is actually a simple thing for most people. It is not some magical SEO bonus bestowed upon those in the know; it is standard practice if you make it easy for Google to do such.

Think about it. What does Google want to do? What is its purpose?

Google’s aim is to provide you, the searcher/user/however you like to be known with the most relevant websites for your search. And the best way it can do that is to work those spiders hard – sending them out to updated and new content as fast as their little legs can manage (ok – enough with the analogy now!).

So how can you tell Google that you have fresh content? Well if you include a XML sitemap plugin then you’re doing it! A sitemap simply lists all the pages within a website, so any changes to this list are easily spotted and updated. When this post goes live, I’ll check Google after 10 minutes and will be surprised if it’s not listing already – not magic, rocket science or fairy dust – it’s just what Google does if you help it.

We use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin but there are several available to you (as with most plugins!). To then set this up, Settings, Google XML Sitemaps – go through each option and set to what you want. It’s quite a list, but don’t be daunted. If you’re at all unsure, leave the standard, default settings in place, or get us to check yours with you. One thing to watch is not to request updates too frequently – any such settings will be suggestions anyway, but if you do update Google too often with the same post, that may not be well-regarded. Let’s face it, daily is more than adequate for most of us – it’s not that long since we had to wait months for our pages to be listed in Google – now we’re talking in hours or even minutes.